b. 19/03/1889 Melbourne, Australia. d. 06/06/1986 Melbourne, Australia.
William Donovan Joynt (1889-1986), known as Don, was born on 19th March 1889 at Elsternwick, Melbourne, Victoria. His father, Edward Kelly Joynt, was from County Mayo, Ireland. He married Alice Woolcott, also from County Mayo, at All Saints Church, St Kilda, Victoria on 1st June 1882. He joined William Dodgshun & Sons, soft goods merchants, an English company, and became their agent in Bendigo, Victoria. When the gold mining industry failed in Bendigo, they moved to Melbourne. In addition to William, they had two other sons: Gerald (who was killed in WWI and is buried in The Huts Cemetery, Ypres) and Reginald.
Don was educated at Orrong Road Kindergarten, Elsternwick, at Grange Preparatory School in Toorak, and at Melbourne Grammar School. He studied accountancy until 1909 with a firm of chartered accountants, Densham & Sherlock. He became disillusioned and travelled north to Queensland looking for adventure. He tried working in the cotton industry, then sheep and wheat farming. He then found work at the Tyrell Downs sheep station before moving to Perth, Western Australia, where he bought land and became a farmer. Unfortunately, he lost his potato crop to disease, and then became very ill himself when leeches infected his leg, leaving him with blood poisoning. After recovering he purchased a property in Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, but he sold it in 1915 when he enlisted.
William D Joynt VC
Having served as a corporal in the Victorian Rifles, Militia, Joynt enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 21st May 1915. Commissioned on 24 December, he arrived in France in May 1916 and joined the 8th Battalion in July. On 30th September he was shot in the shoulder during a raid on the German trenches at The Bluff in the Ypres sector, Belgium. He was evacuated to England, commended in divisional orders and in December promoted to lieutenant. In January 1917 he rejoined his battalion and, except for three months at an army school and on leave during the 1917-18 winter, served with the unit on the Western Front until August 1918, fighting in the second battle of Bullecourt and at Menin Road and Broodseinde. Charles Bean’s official history published his vivid diary account of the fighting near Merris on the Somme on 12th-14th April 1918.
On 23 August 1918, when an attack near Herleville was pinned down, with heavy losses, by intense fire from Plateau Wood, Joynt rallied the attackers and led an advance which cleared the wood’s approaches, then in a bayonet charge captured it and over eighty prisoners. For his `most conspicuous bravery’ he was awarded the Victoria Cross. He was seriously wounded in the buttock on 26 August and evacuated to England. Promoted to captain in October, he was posted to AIF Headquarters, London, in March 1919. In February 1920 he returned to Melbourne, where his AIF appointment terminated on 11 June. His elder brother Gerald, a lieutenant in the 57th Battalion, had been killed at Polygon Wood, Belgium, on 25 September 1917. He received his VC from King George V at Buckingham Palace on 10th July 1919.
Joynt had studied agriculture and sheep-breeding in Bransford, Worcestershire in 1919, and in 1920 after returning to Australia, he became a soldier settler, dairy farming near Berwick, Victoria. By 1926 he had a manager on his block, and when it was resumed in 1929 was pursuing interests in Melbourne. He was a pioneer of colour printing in Australia. About 1920 he had formed Queen City Printers Pty Ltd and with Walter Dexter arranged an exhibition of war photographs in colour, and printed its catalogue. He then formed Colarts Studios Pty Ltd and bought the rights to a German colour-printing process. The business failed during the Depression, but under various business names Joynt remained a printer and publisher for over sixty years. He called himself a `master printer’ when he married Edith Amy Garrett, a trained nurse, in a civil ceremony at Hawthorn on 19th March 1932, his forty-third birthday. They had met in 1923 when she was a nurse at Melbourne Hospital. They had no children.
An inaugural member of Melbourne Legacy in 1923, Joynt helped to lead the club’s successful campaign to have Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance built in its present form on its present site. He was active in the Militia in 1926-33, being promoted to major in February 1930.
Mobilised on 26th September 1939, he commanded the 3rd Garrison Battalion at Queenscliff and then, from March 1941, Puckapunyal camp. From June 1942 he was camp staff officer then quartermaster at Seymour camp. He was placed on the Retired List as an honorary lieutenant colonel on 10th October 1944. He and his wife rented then bought Tom Roberts’s old home, Talisman, at Kallista and lived there until they built their own home nearby. Joynt wrote three autobiographical books: To Russia and Back Through Communist Countries (1971), Saving the Channel Ports, 1918 (1975) and Breaking the Road for the Rest (1979). He attended the 1956 VC Centenary Celebrations at Hyde Park, and also the third and fifth VC and GC Association Reunions at the Cafe Royal in 1962 and 1966. He was also a committee member of the VC and GC Association.
Short and dark, with twinkling grey eyes, Donovan Joynt was a chirpy cock sparrow of a man, self-reliant, dogmatic, conservative, a nominal Anglican, a Freemason from 1924, a dedicated advocate of returned-soldier causes, a special constable during the 1923 Melbourne police strike, a keen club-man and a life member of the Naval and Military Club. In 1979 he described himself as a `Royalist’ with a `love of all things British’, while an old Legacy comrade called him `a dedicated “King’s Man”, a true-blue adherent of all the best traditions and heritages of his British ancestry’. His wife died in 1978. The last surviving of Australia’s World War I VC winners, he died on 5th May 1986 at the Freemason’s Centennial House, Windsor, where he lived for the last six years of his life. He was buried with full military honours in Brighton Lawn Cemetery. He is commemorated with Joynt Street in Wodonga, Victoria, on the Victoria Cross Memorial in Springvale Botanical Cemetery, on the VC Memorial in Campbell, ACT, on the Victoria Cross Memorial in Sydney, and with a VC commemorative stone at the National Memorial Arboretum, Alrewas, Staffordshire.
In addition to the VC, he was also awarded the British War Medal 1914-20, Victory Medal 1914-19, War Medal 1939-45, Australia Service Medal 1939-45, George VI Coronation Medal 1937, Elizabeth II Coronation Medal 1953 and Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal 1977. The medal group was donated by his family to his old school, Melbourne Grammar School in 2021.
LOCATION OF MEDAL: MELBOURNE GRAMMAR SCHOOL.
BURIAL PLACE: BRIGHTON LAWN CEMETERY, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA.
LAWN P, GRAVE 126.
Acknowledgement:
Kevin Joynt – Images of the Obituary newspaper clippings, images of his books, and his grave in Brighton Cemetery, Melbourne.